Day 18, 14 6 2014, Zug to Balzars
We have developed our system over the years, and it works well. It is far from perfect, and in some ways that is good.
The riding in Switzerland has been very easy. The traffic expects bikes and copes well. With just a bit of common sense you can go pretty much where you want without fear of mixing it with difficult traffic.
Today we expected to have a couple of significant climbs, but it turned out to be only one and it was easy. We had to climb around 250m vertical out of Zug to get to the next lake system, but the gradient was only about 3%, rising to a bit more close to the top. We were on a pathway separate from the traffic on the way up to the pass.
For almost all of the day we were either on cycle lanes, pathways paralleling a road, dedicated cycle paths or farm lanes. This has been pretty much the pattern in Switzerland.
We expected to ride over another ridge to get to Lake Walensee, the last of the lakes before getting to the Rhine River. The GPS system on my Iphone, TomTom gave a convoluted series of farm lanes that led us to a dedicated bike path that appeared to have been the main road around the lake before a big new road was built. They have upgraded the old road including its tunnels as a dedicated bike route, and it is superb.
From the end of the lake we followed the bike route signs into the town of Sargans, a few kilometers from the Rhine, which had become a default destination. We rarely have destinations in mind, but the idea of getting to the Rhine, and the time of day suggested Sargans. Sargans was full. This sometimes happens on Saturdays, usually because of some festival, but we do not know the cause this time.
So we rode on to Balzars in Liechtenstein, the next likely place where there was a hotel. There was nothing obvious, so I checked the TomTom database and it suggested the Hotel HofBalzars. modestly priced in Swiss terms, and have particularly nice rooms, a pleasant verandah attached to the room where I am writing this overlooking the mountains.
If we had a more optimised system we would have booked ahead, missed Balzars, and that would have been a shame.
So, our system worked with just enough faults to add a bit of piquancy to our trip.
112Km for the day, mostly with a good tailwind.
Roz says: Always exciting to ride through villages over the speed limit! That was yesterday. Today we had a nice big tailwind. Whoopee. There was even a short 25% hill to test the heart rate.
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